THE POMPEII OF THE EAST - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 10

Arab traders in quest of spices were the first to arrive in the East Indian seas surrounding
Mount Tambora. Their influence endures in the prevalence of Islam in the region. The Por-
tuguese followed in the sixteenth century; then, as their maritime power waned, the Dutch
asserted themselves as colonial masters. The Dutch East India Company established cash crop
production—pepper, coffee, sugar—across the Java archipelago, while delegating daily man-
agement of the estates to Chinese middlemen who brutalized their laborers to meet produc-
tion targets. The Dutch brought nothing to make or sell in the East Indies; instead they ex-
ploited it as a vast farm belt, its riches to be sold on the European market at fabulously in-
flated prices. The well-fed Dutch burghers who gaze contentedly from seventeenth-century
portraits by Rembrandt and Frans Hals were the beneficiaries of this cascade of wealth eman-
ating from the East Indies.
It is thus an historical fluke that places the British in control of Sumbawa at the time of
Tambora's sudden explosion in 1815. Britain's rule of Java and its surrounding islands marks
a brief interregnum in the centuries-long influence of Arab, Portuguese, and Dutch merchants.
Nevertheless, Stamford Raffles's imprint on Java was significant. After asserting control of
the island by military force, Raffles handpicked local sultans to rule over the principalities of
Java and appropriated vast acreages of land. Thus far, a familiar tale of European conquest.
Raffles differed radically from his Dutch predecessors in one respect, however: he had a pro-
found interest in East Indies culture.
Two centuries of Dutch rule produced scarcely a single paper on any aspect of Javan his-
tory, customs, or language. In the brief five years of Raffles's tenure in Java, by contrast, he
fashioned himself as a kind of philosopher king or, more accurately perhaps, as an anthro-
pologist with a bottomless research account, a well-armed regiment at his disposal, and no
professional protocols to bother him. He learned Javanese, in addition to his already fluent
Malay, bought whatever historical manuscripts he could find, and employed fleets of local
copyists to manufacture a library of Javanese source material. He sent an army of assistants
into the field to collect flora, fauna, and geological specimens of all kinds, as well as artists to
make drawings. Once news of the English governor's mania for collecting spread, the prince
of a nearby island sent him an orangutan, which Raffles dressed up like a man in coat and
trousers and hat. 29 Raffles would go on to become the founder and first president of the Lon-
don Zoo.